Doctors remove live cockroach from woman's skull (photo/video)

She said as soon as the sun rose, her son-in-law took her to a clinic closest to her home in Injambakkam, in the south Indian state of Tamil Nadu, but when they got there, the Doctors referred her to another hospital because they thought she might be suffering from a nasal growth.

The second hospital referred her to a third one where the doctors recommended a scan, and told her the discomfort may be coming from a foreign body that seemed to be mobile. Finally, in her fourth doctor visit, at Stanley Medical College Hospital, doctors used an endoscope to find out what the cause of the discomfort was.

However, the head of the ear, nose and throat department M.N. Shankar, said: “It was a full grown cockroach. It was alive. And it didn’t seem to want to come out. It is sitting in the skull base, between the eyes and close to the brain.”

Doctors first tried to use a suction device to remove the cockroach, but the insect clung to the tissues. After a 45-minute process, using suction and forceps, doctors were able to extract the bug, still alive. Because of the location, doctors had to first drag it to a place from which it could be extracted. It had been lodged inside for about 12 hours.

Watch video below:

Doctors placed the insect in a container, its wing spread and its legs moving rapidly.

The doctor said: “If left inside, it would have died before long and the patient would have developed infection, which would have spread to the brain. This is the first such case he has seen in his three decades of practice.”